I played for about an hour and so far I'm not feeling it.
I beat the first boss I encountered and found the fight satisfying but I'm beginning to get the feeling that trading tight level design for an open world was not a good idea.
I hope I'm unlucky and just haven't found any well-designed levels that can be accessed from the overworld or something like that and the good stuff's just around the corner, but so far, not a good first impression.
I'm about 90 minutes in, exploring things at a leisure pace, getting used to it. So far my curiosity about the setting and what's going on is piqued, and that's a pretty important for me in FromSoft's games.
Mechanically, the game plays well. It feels a lot like Dark Souls 3 with a bit of Sekiro (jumping, being able to run away easily with the horse). I'm a bit iffy with how little stamina attacks and rolls consume, and how big the starting bar is. This might push people to roll spam, but this might be a balancing for the open world format. We will see.
I'm liking Elden Ring's stealth, though, at least more than Sekiro's. Sekiro's encounters felt... formulaic? They were too much like precious little puzzle boxes that could be unraveled. And the grappling hook trivialized the escape moments. Meanwhile Elden Ring feels more like Metal Gear Solid V with more of a strategic spin to it, with letting the player pick the angle of approach.
The fashion is absolutely amazing. Loving it, the warrior set might be one of the best-looking starter costumes in all of Soulsborne games.
I'm optimistic. But I do agree that the open world sacrificed something. All open world games do. We'll see how it goes.
Yeah, souls games have a slow ramp up for me until I get more interesting weapons, and I definitely find myself agreeing with you Nanoff. I've done two bosses beyond the tutorial and while they did have mini dungeons from the bonfire as a real level rather than open terrain, it was short and no real variety in the enemies in it. I think that's just a fact of them being early level stuff before you have options over the starting gear and a club, but it's still a downside.
Also, even on low settings my computer occasionally struggles to react, which is a huge problem when it does that consistently on the same boss attack, making it much harder to dodge. 😮💨 Really hoping that's not a theme here, tho maybe I just need a driver update.
